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Mainstream tourist volume forecast methods generally rely on historical market data, not suitable for newly developed tourism area due to the lack of data accumulation. In view of this issue, this paper proposes an objective forecast model for newly developed rural tourism areas. It takes the characteristics of rural tourism areas into account and designs a novel modified gravity model-based method featured with destination tourism attraction variable, effective tourist origin set and parameter quantification methods, to forecast tourist volume indirectly. The empirical study results could well fit with actual tourist volume data in a rural tourism area of China, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infanticide was first observed in langurs nearly 50 years ago, and this rare phenomenon has been inferred to have either an evolutionarily adaptive function or to be a pathological and non-functional behavior. In this study, we report 5 male takeover events in one-male groups of white-headed langurs in the Nongguan Karst Hills, Guangxi, China from 1998 to 2006. We recorded 13 attacks on 9 infants by extra-group males or new resident males. During the male takeovers, all of the infants younger than 6 months (with an average age of 3.6 months [N = 11]) in the groups disappeared. The infant death rate during the 4.2 months after takeover by a new male was significantly higher than the infant death rate calculated for most of the year. Older infants that were still nursing (with an average age of 14.1 months [N = 7]) were often attacked and seriously wounded by the extra-group males or new resident males, but all of them survived. The interbirth intervals of females whose infants were assumed to be killed by males were significantly reduced relative to those of females in groups with stable male tenure (mean = 10 months vs 25 months). Our data suggest that males kill unrelated and unweaned infants during the takeover period to decrease the time until the infants' mothers resume fertility. Thus, infanticide would support sexual selection theory in white-headed langurs. The data also show that infanticidal behavior was directed toward the infants, especially those who were still nursing. Female dispersal may function as a counter-strategy to avoid infanticide., (© 2012 Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd, ISZS and IOZ/CAS.)

Asian leaf-eating monkeys have flexible, environmentally adaptable feeding strategies. The diet and food choices of white-headed langurs (Trachypithecus leucocephalus) have, however, not yet been studied in the Nongguan Karst Hills in China, where one of the two main surviving populations of this endangered species lives. From 2000 to 2002 inclusive, we adopted an innovative video playback analysis method to identify the food species used by the langurs and to calculate the corresponding feeding frequency for each species. The video-aided methodology was shown to be efficient. It provided high-quality images, and the plant species could be identified in 98.3% of the feeding records. Based on this analysis, we found that the langurs in Nongguan fed on 70 species of plants, among which 24 were identified as their staple food species. The cumulative curve for the staple food species reached a plateau at 255 (43.7%) feeding records. This result indicated that most of the langurs' staple food species had been identified by the analysis., (Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel.)